


His First Refrain

by Face_of_Poe



Series: The Conway Cabal [12]
Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Abandonment, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Anxiety, Childhood Trauma, Depression, Foster Care, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Prequel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-28
Updated: 2019-10-30
Packaged: 2021-01-06 00:09:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 18,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21217325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Face_of_Poe/pseuds/Face_of_Poe
Summary: Alexander settles into a groove at school that’s wholly at odds with his increasing and inexplicable discomfort at home as the novelty of the arrangement wears off.Mister Stevens tries to broach the subject in a number of tentative and roundabout ways; Alexander doesn’t know what to tell him, and eventually stops saying much of anything at all.His room is fine.The house rules are few, and fine.The food is fine.School is fine; it’s more than fine, and he buries himself in it because it’s a reprieve from the cold knot he can’t dislodge from his chest when he stops and thinks too hard about this new reality he inhabits. This life he’s invaded.





	1. Part I

**Author's Note:**

> Let's see. Where to begin. 
> 
> Excuse the universe that just won't die. My mental health took a bit of a beating this year and, shocking to no one probably, this AU was the one to seize my creative brain once I managed to wrangle it a bit again. 
> 
> This particular fic is drawn from tidbits here and there throughout the AU to fill in earlier gaps in Alexander's life. Feat: Mr Pendleton, and finally (finally!), a fic including a guest appearance or two from Reverend Knox. 
> 
> Generally speaking though, it's just 18k words of maladjusted, angst-ridden Alexander, i.e., my jam.

He can feel the coach’s curious gaze on him as he waves the runners off for a quick warm up around the track. He can feel the gaze, and he ducks his head lower into his biology text to avoid it.

If he wanted concerned questions from well-intentioned adults, he could take the bus back to Christiansted alone and suffer the awkward, uncertain silence that has come to characterize his relationship with Mister Stevens now that the dust has settled since last month’s move.

Excepting the curious coach, this way is better. Neddy subjects him to the same worried gaze, but has the good sense to avoid the concerned questions. He can sit and read and be ready to tackle the day’s assignments once Mister Stevens picks them up at the end of practice. Enjoy the relative quiet once the runners take off on their longer jaunt through the hills around the school. Relax in a state of _alone _that has been difficult to attain, in a strange dichotomy with the suffocating _loneliness _he’s felt, since his mother died.

Cross country practice started a week ago, two weeks into the school year. The first day, he’d gone to the Stevens house just the same as those first two weeks; every subsequent day has found him here, textbooks spread out on the bleachers. He never so much announced his plan as simply followed Neddy out to the field house like a lost puppy, and waited until Neddy got the hint and sent his dad a text letting him know not to expect Alexander home on the bus.

Mister Stevens took it in stride, but Alexander can see the worry gnawing at him. He’d take a minute to try and reassure the man, _he’s fine, truly_, but that impulse conflicts with his fierce desire, now that he’s settled into this new place, this new life, to simply melt into the background and be as unobtrusive as possible.

As un_noticed _as possible. Easier when Neddy is home to deflect attention. And so he adjusts. And reads textbooks in the bleachers while the cross country team warms up, and feels the itch starting underneath his skin because the coach is curious, and the coach _notices_, and the coach isn’t warming up today and Alexander can read those tea leaves.

It’s barely a minute after the coach sends the runners out on the longer course before heavy footsteps are rocking the rickety steps up to the low row where Alexander has set up shop, moving progressively towards the far side every day he comes. No deterrent for a man who runs ten kilometers for fun, he supposes.

He expects a bit of interrogation; who he is, why he’s there, what he’s doing. But the coach just lowers himself onto the bench of the row beneath him and a few feet away and reclines back on his elbows and kicks his feet up onto the next level down. “Whatcha working on?”

Alexander scowls and buries his face further yet behind his biology book. It says _Biology_ in big, red letters on the front; not exactly a difficult deduction.

After a long pause, he glances overtop the text and flushes at the look of gentle bemusement being cast over the man’s shoulder. He continues chatting after catching Alexander’s eye, and seems none-too-fussed at his rather lacking conversation partner. “More of a humanities man, myself, Godspeed.” A soft huff escapes him, but he doubts the coach caught it with the heavy tome in the way. “Pretty sure the only thing that got me through college maths was the typo on my advising sheet that said I could take stats instead of calc.”

Alexander would say something – at least, he _thinks _he would, maybe – if his brain could simply process beyond the indignation at this invasion of his quiet study space. The audacity of _noticing _him at all.

Maybe the coach gleans that indignation, because his next words have a tinge of apology to them. “Rolled my ankle funny yesterday; giving it a couple days off. Lest you think me lazy.”

It’s more of a snort that he lets out this time, followed by: “If that makes _you _lazy, I don’t think I want to know what it makes _me_.”

He gets a wide grin, something like triumph that threatens to raise the scowl once more out of sheer principle, before the coach looks pointedly along the row of books he’s got set on the bench. “Certainly not lazy, I can see that.” It occurs to Alexander that modesty, were he in possession of any, might dictate a bashful response; but he’s long given up apologizing for his relentless thirst for knowledge. “Suspect I’ll be seeing you in my classroom soon enough.” Alexander quirks a confused brow overtop his long-forgotten reading, and the coach nudges his government text with one elbow. “I’d know Mrs. Ingram’s daunting honors reading anywhere.”

Alexander just stares at him blankly.

The coach poorly suppresses a last smile, taps twice on the metal bench, and pulls his legs back down so he can stand. “I’ll leave you to it.”

The runners just call him _Coach P_. Maybe Neddy’s mentioned it, maybe not, and Alexander’s certainly never saw fit to occupy precious brain space with such trivial minutiae as which teachers coached which sports, but he pieces it together all the same. “You’re Mister Pendleton?”

He turns back, looking faintly pleased and surprised. “That’s right. Sorry. I suppose introductions ought have come first…?”

“I… Alexander.”

“Good to meet you, Alexander.” Alexander accepts the proffered hand after the barest pause, book balanced on his knees. “So – will I be seeing you in advanced history next year?”

“Barring any unforeseen catastrophes in Mrs. Ingram’s class, I should think so.”

Mister Pendleton lets out a sharp, abortive laugh. “Very good, then.”

Alexander retreats back behind his biology book and hears one last soft chuckle before footsteps start clanging their way back off the bleachers.

x—x

The rolled ankle must heal up adequately, because Mister Pendleton doesn’t bother him further for the rest of the week, or the next. Alexander settles into a groove at school that’s wholly at odds with his increasing and inexplicable discomfort at home as the novelty of the arrangement wears off.

Mister Stevens tries to broach the subject in a number of tentative and roundabout ways; Alexander doesn’t know what to tell him, and eventually stops saying much of anything at all.

His room is fine.

The house rules are few, and fine.

The food is fine.

School is fine; it’s more than fine, and he buries himself in it because it’s a reprieve from the cold knot he can’t dislodge from his chest when he stops and thinks too hard about this new reality he inhabits. This life he’s invaded. It’s different somehow, from the couple brief stints he’d spent outside the group home, in houses with a rotating cohort of foster children. Because Mister Stevens did this _for him_, just him, and his bouts of perplexity at the fact war with the constant impulse to apologize for upending his quiet life with Neddy in such drastic fashion.

x---x

It drizzles the morning of the first cross country meet of the season. Alexander tags along when Mister Stevens asks, if only because he can’t fathom explaining sitting through every practice without actually caring one jot about what the team is doing. Neddy gives him a look that says he knows damn well that Alexander has no interest in actually being there, but stays quiet as they climb into the car early in the morning to be ferried across the island.

The rain comes at a harder clip soon after the runners take off. Some of the parents wander back to their cars, some huddle under tents set up for the respective schools competing. Alexander passes through long enough to snag a Styrofoam cup of coffee off the refreshments table, and then takes his novel for his English class and hunkers down in the scant cover offered by the little park information booth adjacent to the parking lot.

When the wind blows just so, his shins and sandals get rained on. But his book is dry and his coffee hot, and he settles in for the long wait. Except it’s only a matter of five, maybe ten minutes before the overcast day darkens further still, and he squints up into a face framed by a black umbrella shielding his toes from further inundation.

“Tell me that’s not coffee.” Alexander holds his gaze and takes a slow sip, gets a mournful sigh in turn. “Stunt your growth that way.”

“That is an unequivocally false old wives’ tale and, as an educator, you should be ashamed.”

“Absolutely. Completely and utterly ashamed.” Mister Pendleton holds out a napkin-wrapped donut with his free hand; Alexander waves it off. Mister Pendleton shrugs and slides it into the pocket of his windbreaker. “Your parents know you raided the coffee table, or is that why you’re hiding over here?”

A beat passes. Alexander cocks his head, opens and closes his mouth, frowns, and then finds himself saying, “My guardian is scared of actually telling me what to do, lest I think he’s trying to replace my dead mother. I just like coffee. And quiet.”

The flicker of obligatory sympathetic curiosity flits through Mister Pendleton’s eyes, but he refrains from unwanted commentary, or questions, or apologies. As it goes, the _dead mother _card is usually pretty effective for ending conversations on an abrupt and awkward note, so he goes back to the page where he stalled out on _Animal Farm_.

But the shadow doesn’t retreat, and after a moment, Mister Pendleton points out, “You know, there’s an empty office in the field house.” Alexander blinks blankly up at him. “In case you ever wanted to do homework at an actual desk… sit in an actual chair… out of the sun…”

“I’m good.” He says it too fast though, and tacks on a belated, “Thanks.”

“Okay.” He turns away towards the tent, and then glances back and reminds him, “There’s always more coffee, or hot chocolate, or donuts, if you decide to come get out of the rain.”

The corner of his mouth quirks up. “Think I even spotted an orange or two. Maybe a banana.”

“The horror.”

x---x

Neddy comes out of the locker room one day and jogs over to where Alexander is diligently setting up shop with his day’s reading. “Hey,” he climbs up the horizontal supports until he’s leaning over the bleacher railing, and waits until Alexander scrambles down a few rows from his books. “Dad’s coming to get you. Some rescheduled appointment, or something.”

“…oh.” He sees Mister Pendleton glance over from where the rest of the team is huddling and waiting to be sent off on warmups. “How are you getting home?”

“René and his sister.”

“…okay.”

For a moment, Neddy looks like he’s going to say something else. Something sympathetic, or pitying, and Alexander braces himself but then he just shakes his head and turns to jog back to the team.

He makes it about ten feet before turning and shouting while he continues blindly on, “Dad said that if you don’t start actually carrying your phone, he’s gonna confiscate it!”

“That doesn’t make any sense!” Alexander hollers back. And then he sighs and returns to his row to start packing his things right back up, a knot forming steadily in the pit of his stomach because he hates these appointments, infrequent as they are. _Placement counseling_, Family Services calls it, and he had to suffer through it each time he got moved in or out of the group home during the long slog of a year following Peter’s suicide.

Supposedly after six months or so, they can transition to yearly check-ins, but that does precisely nothing to ease his mind because the thought that he’ll be doing this for literal _years _is surreal.

Eighteen months his mother’s been dead, and the sheer _absoluteness _of it still strikes him with breathtaking force sometimes.

Maybe Mister Stevens can read some of that in his face, his posture, his mood as they drive towards Frederiksted. Maybe he’s having his own existential crisis over the incomprehensible scale of his life-upending decision, to seek custody of Alexander. He tells him, after the first several minutes’ uneasy silence and after a few abortive attempts, “If there’s anything… If I’m not… I don’t want you to think…”

Alexander shifts in his seat, shifts his gaze vaguely in the direction of the steering wheel without actually meeting the man’s eyes, to at least show he’s listening.

“I want you to have room to adjust, to settle… to grieve,” he tries again, haltingly. “But if there’s something more, if something’s… just _not working _for you, and you feel like you can’t talk to me – you can tell Ms. Dipnall.”

It doesn’t occur for a long, perplexed minute, that this is Mister Stevens’s fumblingly awkward way of telling him that he has an out. He’s always known that, he supposes – but having his guardian actually point it out does do something to loosen the knot of tension in his stomach, at least a temporary reprieve.

He hates the worried creases that have been slowly imprinting themselves more permanently upon Mister Stevens’s face. The obvious preoccupation does little but make him feel guilty, burdensome; _noticed_. So he clears his throat and mumbles his way through an explanation that might even be a little bit true. “The uh… the thing about living in strangers’ houses is that your life has changed and every waking moment is a reminder.” Mister Stevens stares at him, sitting at a light, until the car behind them honks and his attention darts forward once more. “The thing about living with Neddy is that it’s easy to forget, for an instant, and wonder when she’s going to come calling me home for dinner.”

They pull into the office lot and sit, for a terse moment, Alexander’s gaze determinedly down at his lap once more. But he does drum up a last bit of emotional fortitude to tack on, somewhat lamely, “On balance, I wouldn’t… go back though. Given the… given the choice.”

Mister Stevens looks at him again, and Alexander glances up long enough to glimpse a watery smile. “Okay. I appreciate you telling me that.”

_Because you don’t tell me anything else, ever_, he doesn’t say, and maybe the voice Alexander conjures in his head is of a more accusatory tone than he could truly fathom Mister Stevens ever using. The impulse to further explain, even apologize, rears itself, but it’s too late, his throat tightens back up and the words won’t come.

They go inside, get checked in. Wait a few minutes in the otherwise empty lobby while Alexander fights the urge to compulsively tidy up the scattered crayons and torn coloring books in the kids’ area.

When they call his name, he fixes a practiced, benign smile on his face and walks into Ms. Dipnall’s office.

x---x

He tags along for another cross country meet, midway through the season. There’s still the tent with the obligatory and hilariously unhealthy refreshments table, but the weather is clear and calm, a faint ocean breeze drifting up from the nearby shore.

Alexander takes his coffee and meanders across the parking lot to the beach. He finds an errant palm tree and leans against it, toes off his sandals, and wriggles his feet into the cool, shady sand.

And he stares out over the morning surf, letting the mesmerizing expanse of infinite ocean lull him into a sort of blissful blankness, and drinks his coffee.

The interruption isn’t wholly unexpected, but the sudden appearance of another figure still catches him off guard, silent footsteps trekking across the sand. Mister Pendleton comes to hover a few feet away from the tree, arms crossed, staring broodingly out over the ocean in the same general direction, like he’s trying to discern just what it is that has so thoroughly captured Alexander’s attention.

At least he doesn’t give him any grief about the coffee.

After a couple of quiet minutes, Alexander lets out a quiet huff and caves, and points out, “That weekend reading you assigned was _terrible_.” Mister Pendleton turns and fixes him with a quirked brow look. “I mean. Xenophobic and nativist, and such an utterly simplistic take on the massive complexity that is the world and the way people act and interact within it, that I can’t even fathom that somebody _pays _the author to write and research and, for God’s sake, _teach _at a university.”

“Hm.” Mister Pendleton nods, thoughtful, and then points out, “I assign that reading every year.”

“Then it’s _bad _every year.”

“Then I look forward to your critique on it next year.” Alexander opens his mouth, and then closes it again and turns away with a huff and a scowl. “Why are you reading Neddy’s homework? Mrs. Ingram not keeping you busy enough?”

“No,” he answers, utterly unapologetic. “It was there, I was bored.”

“I’m getting the sense that I need to start thinking up ways to challenge you _now_, lest you make next school year a living hell.”

He’s not quite sure whether to take that as a compliment.

“Oh,” Mister Pendleton turns and starts to amble away, but then remembers something and about-faces. “Here, I brought you something.”

Alexander glances around, curious and cautious in equal measure. “Is it more coffee?”

Mister Pendleton reaches into both pockets of his jacket and produces an orange in one hand and a banana in the other. “You seemed mildly judgmental of the donuts last time. Not as judgmental as you seem to be about my choice in reading assignments, mind.”

Alexander bites his lip, and stares at the proffered fruit while he fights back the laugh. Eventually, he selects the banana, and can’t help but chuckle at the triumphant satisfaction on the teacher’s face. “Thank you.”

Mister Pendleton retreats back to the gaggle of waiting parents. Alexander sits in the sand and props his coffee against the tree to free up his hands so he can peel the banana. He chews it slowly, thoughtfully, while he watches Mister Pendleton chat briefly with Mister Stevens and a couple he recognizes as the parents of one of Neddy’s friends, but couldn’t quite say which one.

He spends the rest of the wait composing something in his head.

x---x

It takes until the end of the week to polish the critique to his satisfaction. On Friday, he brings it to cross country practice, and begs a moment from Neddy at the end while he dashes into the field house to find Mister Pendleton collecting his things from the empty office that seems to serve more as a storage space and staging ground for whichever coaches and assistants are about during any given season.

He taps on the door as Mister Pendleton is hoisting a laptop bag onto his shoulder. The teacher turns, offers a curious smile, and holds out his hand on automatic as Alexander steps forward and thrusts the paper at him. “What’s this?”

“My case for why you should really strike that godawful reading from your lesson plans.”

Mister Pendleton’s brows rise steadily towards his hairline, but on the whole his bemusement looks more impressed than incredulous. “I look forward to reading it, Mister-” he glances down at the header of the paper, “-Hamil…” He pauses and glances back down, and quickly recovers. “Mister Hamilton.”

It’s not the tripping over his name that blanks Alexander’s mind out and makes him regret this, every moment of it since that practice with the rolled ankle and the audacity of noticing him there, quietly hard at work.

It’s the way Mister Pendleton subtly assesses his face and considers him, like he’s a puzzle solved, that tells Alexander with startlingly abrupt clarity, that he must’ve taught his older brother James.

He doesn’t remember James being in the advanced senior history course he knows Mister Pendleton also teaches; he doesn’t remember James _not _being in it either. It’s not so much that he can’t recall that year, when he was in seventh grade and James was a senior, as he refuses to let himself _think _about it, for fear that trying to process the utter normalcy of the way it began and the utter horror of the way it ended will shatter some delicate defense holding him together.

So he doesn’t ask. Doesn’t want reminiscence, or questions, or condolences. Doesn’t want to have to think about the brother who cut and ran fifteen months ago, but who effectively vanished six months before that and in a lot of ways, checked out some two years prior to _that _even.

He wants to yank his paper back out of the teacher’s hand. He doesn’t; recognizes the irrational panic driving the instinct, and forces a mumbled farewell before dashing back into the short hallway and out the field house door to find Neddy waiting for him.

He spends that night holed up in his room; claims a stomachache during dinner, falls asleep early, but tosses and turns for a fitful night. The next morning, his plans to bow out of the weekend’s meet go askew, largely because he still somehow forgets that he is Mister Stevens’s responsibility just as much as Neddy now.

“I’m not wild about the idea of leaving you here alone if you’re not feeling well.”

Sometimes, he wonders what Mister Stevens’s vision of his life was like during that year of Family Services limbo. “I will keep my phone by my bed,” he promises.

And gets a look of wry skepticism in return. “Where _is _your phone?”

“…uh…”

Neddy pulls it out of the front pocket of Alexander’s backpack with a triumphant, “Aha!” followed by, “Dead as a doornail.”

“I did start carrying it,” Alexander points out reasonably.

“Alex,” Mister Stevens sighs.

He can feel his face go hot and wills away the flush. “Sorry,” he mumbles, taking the offending device from Neddy and retreating to his room, half-eaten breakfast forgotten on the table.

Neddy creeps into his room twenty minutes later, dressed in his shorts and team shirt. He pushes the door quietly closed again, but not before Alexander can hear the running water of the shower in the next room. “I’m supposed to be _giving you space_,” Neddy air-quotes, while utterly ignoring the instructions and shoving onto Alexander’s bed to lie down next to him. “Granted, I think I’ve heard that twice a week since August.” Alexander just sighs. “He’s trying. For what it’s worth.”

_So am I, _he wants to say, but he’s not entirely sure that it’s true. Maybe he’s just treading water in this strange new world. Maybe that _is _trying, when anything more is simply unfathomable.

Silence falls for a long few minutes. Neddy shows no particular signs of impatience, just stares idly up at the ceiling, and then glances at a message on his phone, and then stares up at the ceiling some more even as they hear the shower shut off and Alexander knows he’ll have to leave soon for his meet. He considers telling Neddy he ought to just go, but something else entirely slips from his mouth.

“This was an office.” He gets a glance first, and then Neddy shifts onto his side so he can better look at Alexander. “Five years I came to this house, weekly at least, and this was an office.”

“Did you think you’d be sleeping on the back porch, or…?”

“I didn’t think at all, is the thing. I just… got an offer and _jumped_ towards something familiar, but it’s… _just _wrong, ever-so-slightly. It’s not… pillows and blankets on your floor, and forts in front of the tv anymore, it’s…”

“Your own bedroom and family phone plans?” Neddy surmises shrewdly.

“It’s like side-stepping into a neighboring reality, and the differences are few but _boy _do they suck.”

A strong arm wraps around his waist and drags him into an awkward half-hug. “I wish I could make it better,” he says, muffled against Alexander’s shoulder.

“I know.” And he does; and he loves him for it. But he can’t figure out how to settle the constant ache of _wrongness _in his chest every time he sets foot in this house, in this room, every night he sleeps in this bed.

He falls asleep with his latest English novel on his chest and his phone charging on the desk.

He sleeps like the dead, and wakes up to enough brightness pouring in the windows that he knows he’s lost the morning; what’s more, a glance at his desk reveals that Neddy and his father are back already, and that someone crept quietly into his room to leave behind a manila envelope and, perplexingly, a single orange.

With some effort, he levers himself out of bed and fumbles for the envelope. Out of it slides a thick stack of papers and, at the top, the essay he’d handed Mister Pendleton the afternoon prior. Heat suffuses his face at the sheer quantity of red pen scribbled all over it, but then he flips through and back, and actually takes a moment to discern some of the messy scrawl and it’s…

Acknowledgements. Agreements, arguments, counterpoints. A follow-up question, and a recommendation for further reading along the lines of one of the points he’d raised. More on the subsequent five pages, including one paragraph Mister Pendleton had circled several times and just scribbled _YES _next to, and a longer note in the blank space beneath his conclusion.

_Alexander – _

_The challenge with humanities is moving students away from learning what to think, and teaching them how to think. When you’ve spent your school career being drilled on facts and names and dates, it takes a certain amount of courage to argue with the material presented to you and not simply memorize and summarize it – which, by the way, accounts for easily 75% of the reading responses I receive on this assignment, year after year. _

_As for the remaining 25% who do engage the author rather than just regurgitate his ideas, I’m not sure I’ve ever read so comprehensive (and, frankly, brutal) a critique, and I’ve certainly never had my motivations questioned in assigning it at all. So I’ll let you in on the secret now – _

_That’s why I assign it. By the end of high school, if we’re doing our jobs right, students should be comfortable arguing with ideas; considering the source alongside the views presented; considering the motivations behind an assignment at all, because academia is not about absorbing only that with which you agree, or accepting even what sounds good at face value. _

_And the thing is, you figured that out before anyone explicitly told you. Don’t let that critical mind atrophy; it’s going to take you far, in whatever direction you decide to pursue your life. _

_-Mr. P_

_p.s. I went ahead and printed out the readings I mentioned in my notes; enjoy at your leisure, please do not feel pressured to provide further response. I’d hate for you to burn out pursuing extra work for a class you’ll be in next year anyway. _

And then below that, in even messier handwriting in a different color, clearly jotted quickly this morning:

_Guess you should’ve taken the orange last week. I’ve sent Tom home with some additional vitamin c, do feel better. _

Inexplicably, he wants to cry. He’s at once giddy and anxious, wants to dive into the new readings right this moment and tackle them with the same single-minded focus and wants to throw them away and stop going to practice after school, and drop out of the honors social studies track for good measure so that he never has to sit in the man’s class and weather this praise, this expectation he’s set for himself.

By the time Sunday night rolls around, he feels hungover. _Exhausted_, despite the fact that he’s passed the last two days sleeping, waking up for brief and furious bouts tackling his homework, eating whatever he can grab on a quick pass through the kitchen, and then falling back into bed. Mister Stevens asks him that evening during one of his ventures out of his room if he needs to see his doctor. When he shakes his head _no_, much more tentatively asks if he wants to go see Ms. Dipnall again, and then winces when Alexander physically recoils at the idea.

Neddy intercepts him en route back to his room after showering for the night. Steers him around to his own room instead, and Alexander lets out a strained chuckle at the sight of the mess of pillows and blankets making a giant nest on the floor.

“For the record,” Neddy closes the door and moves to plug in his phone, scoot his desk chair in and out of the way, “when we got word that you’d finally be moving in… I told dad we should get bunk beds.”

“Okay, but who gets top?”

He gets a grin, which quickly disappears as Neddy flicks off the overhead light. Alexander feels his way towards the amassed pillows and starts carving out a comfortable space for himself. “He said we’d get sick of living on top of each other eventually, and he’d rather not set a tone right off the bat, like you were just here for another sleepover.” Footsteps pick carefully around Alexander’s form huddled beneath one of the spare quilts dug up out of the closet, and then Neddy’s collapsing by his side and fighting for his share of pillows. “Kinda wondering if maybe he was wrong.”

“I don’t know,” Alexander admits, because he truly has no insight into his own brain, his body, the aching pressure building slowly in his chest, more and more suffocating by the day with no release valve obvious to him.

There’s a pause while Neddy shifts and finds a tolerable position on the floor by his side. For a few minutes, Alexander thinks the conversation might be over that quickly, but then Neddy clears his throat softly and murmurs, “You know… I wouldn’t tell dad if you ever wanted to talk or… vent or rage about any of it. Or cry. I don’t think I’ve… _seen _you cry, once, since you were sick.”

_Since your mom died_, he really means. _Since the funeral_.

It’s not that he hides the tears; he simply can’t make them come, much as he _wants _that outlet, that release.

He can’t even remember if he cried when he found Peter, dead on a blood-soaked mattress.

All he knows it that, by the time James came home and found _him_, his mind was little more than a blank buzzing of stunned and surreal disbelief.

x---x

Putting some effort into Getting His Shit Together seems like a good next step.

He carries his (charged) phone. Eats a full breakfast to make up for the weekend’s disjointed meals, and forces some bland small talk, or at least commentary on Mister Stevens and Neddy’s morning conversation. At school before the bell, he tracks down Mister Pendleton’s classroom and thanks him for the feedback (and the orange), and promises not to overexert himself with the additional readings.

At the end of the day, he sends a text to both Neddy and Mister Stevens to let them know he’ll be taking the bus back to Christiansted, but taking his schoolwork to a coffee shop in town instead of coming straight to the house. Mister Stevens thanks him for the update, and even manages to avoid pestering him about his plans as the afternoon wears on, trusts him to his own devices and just smiles faintly when he comes wandering in the door shortly after he got back from picking up Neddy, the sound of the shower still running in the background.

He follows that new routine all week. By the end of it, he’s got all of his existing assignments completed, including an essay for English not due for another week and a half. He’s several chapters ahead of his reading in every class, and on Friday, he pulls the manila envelope out of his backpack and digs into the extra readings Mister Pendleton offered.

On Saturday morning, he tags along for Neddy’s meet. He’s still not precisely _sociable_, but instead of wandering off to some hidden corner, he takes his coffee, orange, _and _donut, and makes himself comfortable on the hood of Mister Stevens’s car.

He has a brief chat with Mister Pendleton about the articles he’d read the day prior; Mister Pendleton does not ask about the week’s change of routine, and Alexander manages with some success to shove back the strong suspicion about him teaching James two years ago, because it doesn’t matter. If the teacher isn’t going to bring it up, Alexander sure as hell can’t fathom any scenario in which he would either. Ever.

In the car on the way home, he speaks up quietly but clearly from the backseat and announces, “I want to go to church tomorrow.” The silence that follows is a bit dumbfounded, and Neddy cranes around in the front passenger seat to quirk an eyebrow at him. “My church,” he clarifies. “My old church.” And he tacks on a bit lamely, “Haven’t been since Peter died, but the reverend came to see me a couple times at the group home.”

Whether it’s the substance of the request, or the fact that Alexander’s asked for anything at all that has Mister Stevens so flummoxed is hard to say. But he collects himself after another couple of blocks and answers easily enough, “I’m sure we can manage that. I don’t remember which…” _which church held your mother’s funeral,_ “…Where did you go?”

“New Light Presbyterian.”

“Kingshill?” He hums a vague affirmative, and fights to hold Mister Stevens’s gaze in the rear-view mirror. “Okay. We can look up service times when we get home.”

_Ten-thirty_, Alexander doesn’t say. Suspects Mister Stevens will enjoy feeling useful.

Alexander stays in the pew after the service is over. He tells Mister Stevens and Neddy, who insisted on staying throughout with him despite his insistence that they could just drop him off and pick him up an hour later, to follow the crowd down to the basement where volunteers serve a meal every Sunday. But he stays in the pew, ostensibly to have a few minutes of quiet time, to stare around the room where he’d once listened to Reverend Knox eulogize his dead mother.

He knows the reverend saw him though, and he waits for the man to finish seeing off those parishioners who wouldn’t be sticking around for the lunch, waits while he calmly returns towards the pulpit and heads through a door for a scant few seconds before emerging sans the robe and stole, looking decidedly more pedestrian in a shirt and tie and peering down his long nose at Alexander under bushy grew eyebrows.

Only the sounds of the last stragglers out in the vestibule break the quiet of the nave while Reverend Knox meanders midway down the row of pews to take up a seat by Alexander’s side. When it becomes clear that the brooding teen has no intention of breaking the silence first, the reverend muses, “You didn’t come up for communion.”

Alexander lets out a heavy breath he didn’t realize he was holding, and shoots a sidelong glance at his companion that’s only a little bit guilty. “I don’t think I’m quite… _there _right now.”

“Is that why you’ve stayed away so long?” He just shrugs dully and fidgets with his shirtsleeves, hot and itchy in an old button down of Neddy’s. “They moved you rather abruptly, and I never did get the name of your friend.”

“They wanted to get the placement in order before the school year started,” he explains down to his shoes. “But it’s – Thomas Stevens. You probably met him at mom’s… yeah. His son Edward. I’m back… near the old house. We’ve been good friends a while now.”

The reverend mulls that over for a long moment while he looks Alexander over with a critical eye. Unsubtle. “You’re disquieted.”

“It’s _wrong_. Everything, just… I’m drifting. I’m not happy, and I’m not unhappy, I just… go through the motions, day after day, and I’m living a life that isn’t mine and I can’t… _turn it off_. The _wrong_.” He draws a shuddering breath, and thinks maybe _now_, that knot of tension will loosen and the floodgates will open, but the pressure just tightens his throat and churns in his stomach, and no tears come. Softly, he adds, “I don’t want to be here anymore.”

Reverend Knox looks at him sharply, and his eyes dart instinctively up. And he reads the fear there, and hastily clarifies, “I mean… that house, that neighborhood. That school. Christiansted, Saint Croix. This nowhere place with nothing left for me. I’m _drowning _on this island, and cannot possibly fathom how I’m supposed to live a _life _here.”

“Can I hug you?” _No_, Alexander thinks. But he just shrugs again, apathetic, and the reverend settles for wrapping one arm around his shoulders. “Alexander, I lost your brother some years before he physically _left_.” He hunches in further on himself, draws his feet up onto the bench and hugs his legs, rests his cheek on his knees and turns his face away. He feels ridiculous, feels like a child. Feels guilty for his dirty shoes on the pew, but it goes unremarked upon. “And I’m not talking about attending service… skipping communion. Rachel tried, desperately, but he felt lost, and then angry, stopped making sense of the world – stopped trying to make sense of the world, eventually stopped _wanting _to make sense of the world.”

He says nothing; forcing his breath to stay calm and even takes his all.

“I understood, during the past year. Why you retreated. Kept yourself distant from a series of short-term situations. But you’re still in self-preservation mode, in what shouldn’t be a short-term arrangement, no?”

“So long as Mister Stevens doesn’t get tired of me, I suppose,” he mumbles.

“Alexander.”

He bites back a sigh and uncurls a little bit, throws up his hands. “No. He’s very earnest, and concerned, and accommodating, and paralyzed by wanting to help me adjust without pushing me away, and after all the bullsh – _hoops _he jumped through with Family Services to even get me there in the first place, he’s not going to give up and ship me back.”

_You can tell Ms. Dipnall_, Mister Stevens had reminded him. _Offered _him. Pointed to the door that was still cracked open, just a sliver, just in case.

“But you don’t want to be a burden,” Reverend Knox surmises quietly. “He opened his house, and his time, and his life to you, and the least you can do in turn is be an unproblematic ward. It’s not that you don’t want help, it’s that you don’t want to admit you need it.”

“I _don’t_ need it.”

“You do,” the reverend returns bluntly, “and not the sort I can offer. Not the sort anyone can force you to accept, if you won’t meet them halfway.”

“Well, there it is, then.”

The reverend withdraws his arm and runs his hands anxiously through his hair. “Alexander, your mind could get you anywhere if your _pride _doesn’t sabotage you into an early grave.” His feet slip back onto the floor and he shifts sideways to stare at the reverend, nonplussed.

_Whatever this feeling is, _he mulls with absolute conviction_, it’s not pride. _This suffocation. This need to coast, unobtrusive and unnoticed and study and read and write to occupy his jittery brain and –

And _pride_, he thinks, expression turning contemplative. Maybe he can work with _pride_.

Maybe he can still dredge some up, rekindle it from the ruins of the past year and a half of his life.

Reverend Knox extracts a promise from him to stay in more consistent touch, now that his situation has stabilized. And then he cements it by mentioning it to Mister Stevens when they finally wander downstairs to join the congregation for chicken salad and jello molds, and his guardian is only too thrilled to find something of an ally in this whole project he’s undertaken, in taking Alexander in at all.

Alexander largely tunes them and their quiet scheming out. Hums a vague assent at Mister Stevens’s suggestion that they could have the reverend over for dinner from time to time, nods his agreement when Reverend Knox suggests that he and Neddy come help pack lunches for the Thanksgiving drive next month.

Whatever keeps the peace; it’s mostly irrelevant for his purposes, he’s starting to realize. His thoughts drift, instead, towards Mister Pendleton.

Mister Pendleton, it dawns on him, is the key. _His _key, his ticket off this godforsaken island.

His escape.


	2. Part II

His mother imbued in him the joy of learning. School taught him the power of an education.

Pride, he’s beginning to understand, will help him figure out how to best utilize that education as a means to his own non-academic ends.

He starts researching colleges. He starts researching colleges far, far away from here. Stares at pictures in guide books he finds in the school library on a shelf labeled _Seniors – college materials _and tries to picture himself weathering snowy New England winters, or navigating the sprawling campuses of big state schools that have more students than Saint Croix has inhabitants. Pictures little suburban hideaways, and small town colleges the size of his high school.

None of it fits, though. He supposes he probably knew that before he even starting flipping the pages. He doesn’t just want to get away though, he wants to _escape_, into another life or as close to it as he can manage, and that means swapping the glacial pace of his island exile for bustling crowds in a concrete jungle, a life that keeps him so busy he can’t even quite recall what it is he was running away from in the first place.

He flips to the tab for _New York_.

x---x

Alexander’s always done well in school. His revelation in the church, while perhaps not of the precise sort the reverend might have hoped, sparks a new fervor of ambition in his academics. After spending the end of his seventh grade year catching up from missed school on account of his own sickness, and then his mother’s death and subsequent life adjustments, and his eighth grade year disjointed at a different middle school altogether while he bounced between the group home and a couple of ill-conceived family placements, he decides two months into high school that he won’t let anything else get in his way.

Some of his teachers take his sudden transition from _quiet hard-worker _to _persistent loud-mouth _with better grace than others. He thinks about what Mister Pendleton had said in response to his unexpected article critique, and applies a certain skepticism to as many of his subjects as he reasonably can.

His English teacher seems to bemusedly enjoy having someone willing to go toe-to-toe on the dull world of literary symbolism; Mrs. Ingram in honors government seems wholly unimpressed at his efforts to troubleshoot the U.S. Constitution from her classroom at 8 a.m. and snaps at him to take notes.

Mister Pendleton takes to nodding at him in the hallways, offering a friendly smile. Alexander hunkers down in the bleachers during practice some days, and some he retreats to his coffee shop hideout in Christiansted. He never goes straight to the house.

He does go to the last cross country meet of the season though, on a windy November morning just before Thanksgiving. The runners are sent off, and Alexander follows Mister Stevens to grab some coffee. They hover in as close to companionable silence as they ever exist in for several minutes, casually watching the intermingling of Neddy’s teammates’ parents, Mister Stevens exchanging the occasional greeting, until Mister Pendleton eventually wanders over.

“Hey, Tom.”

“Hi, Nate.”

When they got to be on first name terms, Alexander is not quite sure.

“How are you, Alexander?”

“Alright.”

He gets a quirked brow. “I heard that Ms. Uppingham wants to form an inter-island debate club and populate our team with no one but you.”

“In the second grade, he gave a speech during assembly arguing over the importance of increased recess time,” Mister Stevens points out.

Alexander bows with a flourish while Mister Pendleton laughs. And then he straightens and announces, out-loud, for the first time, “I’m going to go to Columbia.”

Both men throw questioning his glances his way. “The country?” Mister Pendleton asks.

“The college,” Alexander clarifies, and Mister Stevens chokes on his coffee.

“Alexander, I haven’t even had you yet for class, but I somehow suspect that if any of my students could manage it, it’ll be you.”

He goes pink. “Were you going to tell me about your plans?” Mister Stevens asks, once he catches his breath, and he goes even pinker.

Because…

Well, it’s not that the answer is _no_, precisely. It’s just…

It’s not part of the equation. Or at least, a very small part of the equation, some years down the line when he needs guardian signatures on applications. Mister Pendleton is the one who will help Alexander _get there_, he’s more than confident of that fact. He needs Mister Pendleton. Needs him to understand the stakes.

And now? Now that he’s said it?

Pride dictates that he make it happen. No matter the obstacles.

He has just over three years to figure it out.

x---x

As promised, Alexander and Neddy go and volunteer their time at the church for the Thanksgiving meal drive. Christmas Eve, they spend with Mister Stevens; Christmas Day, Neddy goes to his mother’s place, and Mister Stevens takes Alexander to the morning service. He leaves though, off to get ready for work – tourist season in the Caribbean, busy time for the restaurant he manages. Alexander spends the day with Reverend Knox, who is visibly suspicious about the about-face in his chipper attitude.

But he tentatively points out, “You seem to be settling in a little better,” and Alexander nods because he has plans and _priorities _now, under which he can shove the rest of the anxiety and that sense of _wrong_, in service of future goals.

Christmas is never cold on Saint Croix, but Alexander always feels like it _should _be. Too much media, too many books with children waking up to magical, snowy Christmas mornings, books his mother had always read to them with a bit of wanderlust in her eyes.

He wanders across the road from the church to the cemetery – the expanded one, in fact, with the oldest headstones sitting in a little plot behind the church; _older _than the church, carved names worn down and nearly illegible, eerie epitaphs speaking of half-remembered tragedies past.

_Pestilence._

_Famine. _

_Uprising. _

_Hurricane. _

He has vague recollections of James luring him out to the graveyard when they were bored after service. Trying and failing to scare him, because Alexander was too enamored of the slowly eroding history surrounding them. Skimming his fingertips over names nearly lost to the years since whatever fateful date etched into the stone.

Those memories drift away on the mild breeze, more or less of their own accord, as Alexander crosses rows of gravestones in search of his mother’s name. When he finds it, he sits on the grass with a sigh, absently pulling the long blades between his fingers, and lets himself be sad.

x---x

In mid-January, he turns fourteen. His second birthday as an orphan, but on balance far superior to that _first _birthday as an orphan, when he was in the midst of a hasty move back to the group home in light of some… _severe _philosophical differences with a foster family.

Neddy jumps on his bed to wake him up and blows a noisemaker in his face. Alexander shoves him off, and he lands on his ass with a _thump_, laughing, and blows the noisemaker again.

They keep it subdued, and he’s quietly grateful that Mister Stevens can read the room that much. There’s a half-dozen cupcakes sitting on the table when he and Neddy get home from school, but they don’t make a whole to-do about it.

After Neddy goes to bed, Mister Stevens comes to sit beside him on the sofa where he’s finishing up some reading review ahead of an English test the next morning. He hides his annoyance at being interrupted, mostly because he knows that Mister Stevens is still absurdly nervous around him and would wait all night for him to emerge from the book if he were that absorbed.

“Two things,” he says when he realizes he’s got Alexander’s attention. “Two quick things.” He produces a small shoulder bag from the floor by his feet, a bag Alexander hadn’t noticed him carrying over. “Neddy insisted you wouldn’t want anything for your birthday, but -”

“Neddy knows me well,” Alexander returns, but it’s more resigned that rancorous.

“Well, I tried,” he smiles, gentle. Cautious. “Blame sentimentality. And blame Reverend Knox, he’s half-responsible. At least we settled on practical.”

He hands the bag over, and it’s an obvious sort of a bag, specific, but Alexander is still a little shocked by the laptop he pulls out of it. It’s nothing terribly fancy, but it’s a good size, a respectable brand, and it beats typing things up in the library during study hall when he’s worried about competing for the household computer with Neddy on a given day.

He thinks about his weird mental block against using the cellphone for the first several weeks he lived here.

He thinks about his long-term plans, his _escape _plans, thinks about the world that opens up to him with his own computer at hand, and suspects he’ll have less trouble adjusting to this gift.

“I – thank you,” he manages after several dumbfounded seconds. “That’s – practical. Yes. Wow.”

“Obligatory warning about talking to strangers on the internet.”

A strained chuckle forces its way past his lips. “Warning noted.”

“The other thing.” Mister Stevens looks somehow _more _nervous about this, and he produces an official-looking envelope from the end table by his side. “Um… I know Rachel always wanted to have some savings set aside for you boys.” Alexander starts; it might be the first he’s heard the man directly mention his mother since he came to live here. “I imagine most of anything she _did _manage went towards various expenses at the end, or…went to Peter to cover custody expenses.” _Or ended up in James’s hands and helped him run wherever he dashed off to hide and never look back_, Alexander doesn’t add. “I imagine you know that Family Services pays a monthly stipend to foster guardians.”

“Oh.” He blinks. Off-guard and awkward. “I mean. Yeah, but…”

“You don’t ask for much of anything,” Mister Stevens points out quietly. “And I never had the impression you were much of a high-maintenance child, but… you can, you know? If there’s… something you need, something you want. Hell, a _snack _you want in the kitchen.”

_Something that will make you feel at home_.

He doesn’t want to feel at home. Not when his every waking thought is occupied by thoughts of how to get away.

There’s no explaining that though. No explaining that it’s not personal. That this deck was stacked well against them all long before he made it through the front door back in August.

“Anyway,” the man sighs when it becomes clear that no response to that is forthcoming. “Aside from the initial adjustment, getting your room ready… I haven’t had much use for that stipend. So I set up a savings account in your name a couple months back.” He passes over the envelope that Alexander now sees has the logo of the main bank in town. “You can’t take full custody of the account until you’re eighteen, but you can access it so long as you have your account number and your student i.d. I would of course suggest… leaving it be, much as possible. A college fund… an airfare fund, if New York is indeed in your future.”

It’s tempting to open the envelope, look at the account information; that seems rude. Regardless, he can’t even begin to wrap his head around the myriad emotions rising up in him.

He certainly never heard of any foster parents setting aside their stipends for their wards while he was in the group home. It certainly never happened at either of his brief placements, not with the elderly couple whose health issues forced them to essentially give him back a month later, _certainly _not with the devoutly religious family with a half-dozen children, biological, adopted, and foster, who tried to yank him out of school between semesters so he could homeschool with the rest of the lot.

It occurs to him that he should tell Neddy and Mister Stevens that story. Or Reverend Knox. They’d find it hilarious, he thinks. Or tragic. Or tragically hilarious.

Maybe one day he’ll be in the mood for reminiscence.

He doubts it.

“Is that… okay?” He blinks up and realizing he’s been staring at the bank logo for a minute or more. “I just don’t want you to feel stuck. I want you to have _something _to fall back on when you… _if _you leave.”

The stumble is telling.

It tells him that Mister Stevens is not so oblivious. That he’s garnered some inkling as to the motivations behind Alexander’s relentless fervor when it comes to school, and his perpetual disjointedness within the walls of this house.

He wonders if the man has any regrets.

“What if – ?” He aborts the question and presses his lips together. Sees frustrated sorrow flit across his guardian’s face and he wants to take back that brief moment of insecurity.

“I’m _sorry_, Alex,” Mister Stevens manages after a moment, head in his hands, eyes fixed on the floor. “I’m sorry for what’s happened. For how too many people in your life have treated you.”

_How they left you_.

It’s not that he truly thinks Mister Stevens would leave him, toss him to the curb, ship him back to the group home and a new round of relocation counseling appointments.

It’s the question he can’t answer, and can certainly never ask. The question that baffles him, unsettles him, keeps him up at night and quietly watchful during the day even still, searching futilely for clues.

_None of them wanted me – so why on earth should you?_

x---x

The dam inevitably starts to crack, and at the worst possible time. It’s near the second anniversary of his mother’s death, when he wakes up to a scratchy throat. He pops a couple of Tylenol tablets from the bathroom cabinet, eats some warm oatmeal that somewhat soothes his throat, and feels like he’s operating at about ninety-five percent capacity by the time he gets to school.

By the time he gets back home, he can tell he’s starting to run a fever. His _eyes _feel hot, if that’s even possible, his mouth is parched despite the water he’s been chugging all day, and he darts quickly into the bathroom to take a couple more Tylenol and secret a small handful into his bedroom to get him through the rest of the night.

Medicine gets him functionally through Tuesday, even if he won’t admit how many pills he took between classes throughout the day.

Wednesday he’s forced to concede that this is something more than a cold, is getting decidedly _worse_, and he really ought to confer with Mister Stevens.

He doesn’t. He lets the comfort of routine glue his mouth shut – talking hurts anyway. And the thing about being forever quiet and sullen, is that being _sick_, quiet, and sullen passes entirely under the radar and over his and Neddy’s heads. He can’t exactly blame them.

He can’t exactly explain even to himself his reticence to reach out. _You don’t ask for much of anything_. Fear of being burdensome? An inconvenience?

Weak?

Vulnerable?

His voice is rasping by the time he and Neddy make it home – so mostly he just doesn’t talk. Mister Stevens spends most of the evening at the restaurant anyway, and Neddy is engrossed in his homework while he blindly devours the leftovers they pulled out for dinner.

“Not hungry?”

Alexander blinks up from where he’s absently twirling spaghetti noodles around his fork. In something of a feverish trance watching the tines turn and turn and turn. “Tired,” he manages, clearing his throat to cover for the rasp and ultimately just triggering a coughing fit that feels like needles stabbing up and down his neck.

_Tomorrow_, he vows. Tomorrow he’ll stay home. He hasn’t even missed a day of school this year, and it’s February. One won’t hurt.

He wakes that night in a cold sweat, hoodie plastered to his skin and a reminder of the chills that set in when he went to bed.

He wakes that night to weight settling on the edge of the bed behind him and a hand gripping his shoulder, and he whines low in his tortured throat and tries to burrow deeper into his sweat-soaked pillow.

“Hey.” The hand leaves his shoulder, and then the backs of fingertips are seeking out whatever scarcely exposed bit of forehead they can reach. “You sound pretty rough.” He tries to roll further away, dislodges the hand, wonders if he’s contrary enough the man will just _go away_, _leave him be_, but – “Come on, Alex, you’ve gotta wake up a little.”

“M’awake,” he grouses, and regrets every effort that puts yet more strain on his throat.

“Sit up, then.” An unusual sharpness to the tone there that gives him pause; grounds him ever-so-slightly out of his fever-induced delirium. “I want to get your temperature and get some medicine in you, come on.” He grudgingly rolls and levers himself incrementally higher up on his pillows. “Open,” Mister Stevens holds out a thermometer, and Alexander glares at it even as he obeys and holds the thing under his tongue.

A discerning gaze sweeps over him, his matted hair and damp sweatshirt that’s suddenly sticky and stifling. “You have chills?”

_Yes_. He shrugs.

The thermometer beeps and is plucked back out of his mouth without hesitation. “Well,” he gets past a pursed-lip stare. “You’re up there. Here,” he fumbles for a medicine bottle on the desk, and a bottle of water, and Alexander just takes whatever he’s given, too exhausted and miserable to be anything but obedient. He winces as he swallows. “Your cough woke Neddy up – this just set in since you went to bed?”

_No_. He shrugs.

Worry. Frustration. Bafflement. A quiet sigh and, “Neddy took some sheets out to the couch. Why don’t you change into some cooler pajamas and try to get some sleep out there. I’ll change the sheets in here for the morning.”

He’s never quite sure after, what it is that strikes him in that moment. But he blinks at the hapless man perched there, thermometer in one hand, water bottle in the other, blinks once, twice –

\- and bursts into tears.

x---x

Three days of misery and by the time Neddy’s home from school, the antibiotics have brought the fever done and mostly done away with the throat pain from the strep infection.

He feels like an idiot. He feels like an _asshole_, and has since the doctor finally wheedled out of him that he’s felt sick since Monday. Since Mister Stevens let out a low, harsh breath, and slumped in defeat in his corner chair, head in his hands.

It’s the same doctor he’s seen since he was a baby, and he takes Alexander’s unexpected reappearance at his practice in good stride – but he does send him alone back to the waiting room for a few minutes after his exam, and it’s weird knowing that they’re talking about him.

He doesn’t quite have the energy to feel angry about that, or even so much peeved. _Chastised _hits closer to the mark, and he knows that he’s failing at this whole endeavor, his effort to put up _some _façade of normalcy amidst his constant drive to best position himself for his eventual escape.

Collapsing back on the couch when they make it home from the pharmacy is part exhaustion, part concession to Mister Stevens’s visible anxiety. He takes the proffered pill with water from the glass still sitting on the end table and what he really wants is coffee, but he figures if Mister Stevens will ever figure out where to draw that line, it is assuredly here.

So instead, he bites his lip and forces up a request. “Can I have some tea?”

He gets a surprised glance, but it’s quickly contained. “Honey?”

“Sure. Thanks.”

The shriek of the kettle a few minutes later permeates his dreams, but isn’t quite enough to wake him up.

x---x

“_…Rachel_…”

“…_two years since…_”

“…_not going to_…”

“_Are you okay?_”

Alexander forces his eyes open with drunken thoughts of answering the question, but it’s not directed at him. Footsteps in the kitchen, and then voices, and he’d think Neddy was home from school but it feels too early and –

“Ann.”

“_Tom_,” she volleys back and, oh. He cranes his neck around and catches a glimpse of a fluttering green skirt and wild, dark curls, before Neddy’s mother is turning and sees him awake and watching. “Sorry, sweetie,” she says. “Just dropping some things off. Do you need anything?” He shakes his head best he can in his awkward position, and is curling back around on the couch even before she says, “Go back to sleep, I’m sure you need it.”

He likes Ann. Sometimes he goes with Neddy to spend time with her, sometimes not, and it’s a very informal sort of arrangement they have anyway. But she’s restless with life, and absentminded when it comes to the day’s mundane responsibilities, and he knows that the split was fairly amicable, as those things go. Still, it’s unusual to see her here.

They retreat down the hallway, to Mister Stevens’s bedroom by the sound of it. _Their _old bedroom, it occurs, but he and Neddy became friends just on the heels of that separation and so he never knew it as such.

In the ensuing quiet he drifts, but it’s that edge of sleep, quasi-awareness, where the occasional sounds around him blend faultlessly into the dreams shaping up in his head. He doesn’t know how long passes – somewhere between a minute and a lifetime – before careful footsteps echo back down towards the kitchen, and he doesn’t think he imagines them pausing in the doorway of the living room, but his eyes are heavy and that edge-of-dreams state is compelling.

Until he hears his mother’s name once more in hushed tones from just beyond the doorway. Followed by murmurs too quiet to make out in Mister Stevens’s low voice, and then Ann in more exasperated pitch:

“You can’t _give _him happiness, Tom. Stability? Yes. Support, as much as he’ll accept it. But he just – it’s not _you_, he doesn’t know _how_ to cope with being cared for right now. From anyone. Except maybe Edward, because that relationship didn’t fundamentally change the way yours did.”

There’s a heavy pause, before Mister Stevens starts, “He’s just so…”

“_Honey_.” He cuts off before Alexander can hear what he’s _so_. _So sad? Detached? Damaged? _“I’m just – I realize there’s a certain irony in _me _being the one to tell you this but…”

Tersely, after a beat: “What?”

“Tom, that boy is going to break your heart one day.”

x---x

Neddy laughs at him when he gets up the next morning to get ready for school. “Yeah, no.”

“But -”

“Dad called you out already, the office is collecting your work for me to pick up at the end of the day, you’re staying home, deal with it.”

His fever’s gone, his throat feels better, and he chafes under the thought of missing two days just before a weekend, waiting until Monday to start finding his footing again. The look on Neddy’s face tells him that no argument will be brooked here.

The look on Neddy’s face sends a hot rush of shame up his throat. He bites his lip, hard, and searches for something, _anything_, to say about the chaos of contradiction in his brain, but Neddy preempts him.

“I’ll be late today. I keep putting off weekend plans with David and René, we’re going to catch a movie after school.”

His tone is level; matter-of-fact. Yet weirdly cutting, in a way Alexander struggles to fully explain.

He and Neddy were each other’s worlds practically from the word _go_. At nine, Neddy’s life was in a certain amount of upheaval with his parents’ separation. At seven, Alexander had never really _had _a friend before. It’s still not a particular skill, but it doesn’t really bother him and he certainly doesn’t resent Neddy his social life beyond his friend-turned-dysfunctional-foster-brother.

But he can’t deny that Neddy has been neglecting that social life – cultivated in the vacuum of the eighteen months between Alexander’s mother dying and Mister Stevens getting custody of him – since Alexander moved in.

The timing of today’s outing, innocuous as it is, seems… pointed.

“Just don’t lose my work,” he finally says. Goes for light-hearted, but the pause undermines the levity of his tone. He turns to go back to his room, at least pretend to go back to sleep, but Neddy stops him just as he starts to nudge the door closed.

“Do you know what dad texted me at school yesterday morning?” Alexander’s brow furrows, and he shakes his head. The sound of a dish clinking in the sink makes Neddy pause and listen, and then he continues in a softer voice, “Not that you had strep, or that you were going to be fine. He just said _not the flu_. Because where else would our heads go?”

He’s turned on his heel and disappeared into the bathroom to take a shower before Alexander can begin to wrap his mouth around any kind of response to that.

x---x

Mister Stevens is at the kitchen table with a couple of black binders that Alexander recognizes as something to do with restaurant finances. A quick glance shows tabs for inventory and delivery receipts, credit card transactions and cash deposit slips. Just the standard monthly justifying the books, Alexander suspects, from the lazy and disinterested way the man is flipping between pages, jotting the requisite numbers, rinse, repeat.

He spares a glance and a quiet hum of acknowledgement when Alexander sidles into view, padding noiselessly on the tile floor in stocking feet. The coffee pot still sits half-full, and he can feel the watchful gaze at his back while he reaches into the cabinet for a mug.

But he also thinks he might be entirely imagining it.

He replaces the pot and stands there for a long moment, hands propped on the counter, tired and resigned and guilty. Mostly just tired. Maybe a little frustrated. Maybe a _lot _frustrated at the emotional paralysis that’s been gripping him these past six months and, truthfully, probably longer but less apparent while simple _survival _guided him day in and day out.

Coming here _wasn’t supposed to be like this_.

It baffles him, how he at once knows that, and knows that he _can _relax, that this house has plenty of room to accommodate him finally unpacking his emotional baggage; and yet the sheer thought of letting any of it go _terrifies _him, utterly.

He wipes a hand across his face and fishes his phone out of the pocket of his pajama pants. He forces his trembling hand to settle by first grabbing the hot coffee mug and taking a slow, measured sip, and then he taps slowly:

_To: Mr Stevens_

_I’m sorry _

The muffled sound of the man’s phone humming behind him suggests it’s tucked away in his pocket. There’s a bit of rustling, and he braces himself, torn between fleeing the room altogether and turning and sitting at the table and having a conversation like a goddamn adult.

Mister Stevens doesn’t say anything though. Alexander continues to stand there, drinking coffee that’s still too hot, forcibly controlling his breathing, when his phone vibrates and shakes across the countertop, startling him into spilling hot coffee over the side of his mug.

_From: Mr Stevens_

_Just promise me you’ll take all your medicine, k? _

A strangled laugh tears its way from his throat, and that knot of pressure slowly dissolves into a different sort of emotion. He pockets his phone, refills his mug, and turns to slump down into the chair opposite his guardian and swears, “No antibiotic-resistant strep in this house, I promise.”

Mister Stevens smiles tentatively at him from across the table before taking a sip of his own coffee, pulling a face that tells Alexander it’s long gone cold by now, and then closing up his binders while still very obviously in the middle of his work. “Let’s do something today. Go somewhere.”

An invitation for suggestions, clearly. His mind draws a blank. Rather, the things that _do _flit through it range from the absurd to downright masochistic.

_The old house. _

_His mother’s store. _

_The bookshop where Peter took him, every Friday after school and work, while James was nowhere to be found_.

“If you’re up for it,” Mister Stevens tacks on belatedly, and Alexander can only imagine his expression.

But then he thinks about the exhilarating day, the summer after Neddy turned ten, when his mother and Mister Stevens sat them down and informed them that they were hereby allowed to roam downtown and the boardwalk on their own, provided a number of rules about _where _and _when_, and _always always always staying together_. 

“At the risk of sounding too _tourist_ – maybe we could go get lunch on the boardwalk?”

Mister Stevens buries his surprise quickly at getting an actual answer, and smiles and nods. “That sounds nice.”

x---x

This, Alexander is forced at last to conclude, is love.

It’s a slow conclusion; a reluctant conclusion, and it makes something intangible itch just beneath his skin.

During his fourteen years to date, he’s experienced love of all sorts, and witnessed even more, and too, too much of it is messy. Painful, _complicated_. Because to love a person is to relinquish to them a piece of you, and that piece is abruptly and irrevocably outside of your control.

Sometimes you know when you can’t trust a person with that burden, but it’s probably worse when you think you _can_.

He likes to think Mister Stevens harbors no such delusions.

Alexander is not so maudlin as to declare himself entirely devoid of love in the wake of his father’s and brother’s abandonments, his mother’s and cousin’s deaths. But that love has its place. Falls into the natural order of things. With Neddy, the protective devotion of constant friends. With Reverend Knox, the attachment born of long years of mentorship, of guidance, and the affection of a man who’s watched a child grow from infancy and is yet invested in where his life’s journey takes him.

With Mister Stevens, there is no clear roadmap – at least not that Alexander’s brain can follow – that brings them to this point. A love free of obligation, by blood or faith. A reckless love in the absence of those guardrails, flimsy as they’ve proven thus far in Alexander’s life.

And he has no idea how to tolerate that. How to bear the weight of this unasked-for piece of someone’s heart, when his own is so tightly guarded he can’t even begin to fathom the question of whether or not he _wants _to reciprocate the sentiment, let alone whether or not he actually _does_.

_That boy is going to break your heart one day._

He understands Ann’s words now. Or, rather, her words he wasn’t even supposed to hear offer that final clue, to help draw his months of unshakeable discontent together. Except it feels like answering the question without actually solving the underlying problem. Like he’s missed a step somewhere along the way, some crucial bit of clarity or context or insight into his _own _heart and head that should have made today’s revelation obvious a long, long time ago.

He hates that Ann is right.

He hates that he’s more assured than ever that he needs to be free of this place at the first possible opportunity.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Plan is to have final part up tomorrow, and then a silly one-shot that slots into the opposite end of this universe that I wrote months ago and just kind of sat on, and then take November to maybe tackle a NaNo project. Eeee. 
> 
> Also for any AU newcomers to the scene, I just put up a chronological order of fics in the series description, my brain unraveled this one in super hot mess fashion. Though I'd argue that the core fics (basically anything that's not a one-shot) are best read in posted order.


	3. Part III

“President Hancock,” Nora Hunter informs the class as she stands straight and tall with carefully organized notecards in one hand and the remote to navigate the corresponding PowerPoint presentation in the other, “got his start in federal politics as a congressional page when he was seventeen.”

The month of April, Mrs. Ingram apparently decided some years ago in her teaching career, is best spent boring the class to tears with daily presentations about the long succession of old white American presidents.

Alexander got stuck in the goddamn Gilded Age. _Giving _the presentation nearly put him to sleep, much less researching it. Nora, who has a better grasp of staying on Mrs. Ingram’s good side in _her _particular brand of overachievement, snagged the enviable last slot on the current president.

_Randomly assigned_ his ass.

“After studying economics and law at Har -”

“What’s a congressional page?” Alexander calls out, less out of curiosity and more because he knows it’ll throw Nora out of her carefully rehearsed groove, and apparently boredom makes him a bit of a jerk.

“Oh. Um.” She gets flustered, accidentally taps the button to advance her slideshow, and has to put down her cards so she can sort out the problem. Nora’s rueful smile tells Alexander that she knows this is most _definitely _fair turnabout for her detouring his presentation into a ten-minute discussion on muckrakers. “Pages were like… aides for their representatives?”

“So like, interns?”

“Um…” She sends a silent pleading glance to Mrs. Ingram because, unlike Alexander and the muckrakers, she clearly was not anticipating this particular detour on an inane bit of Hancock’s personal trivia.

The teacher looks between the two of them and looks like she’s fighting to keep from rolling her eyes. But she does save Nora. “Messengers,” she corrects. “Pages acted as messengers across the Hill in the days before computers and the internet and cellphones made their jobs obsolete. The House shut the program down five, maybe ten years ago.”

“Sounds tedious,” Alexander quips. He positions himself perfectly behind his neighbor’s head so Mrs. Ingram can’t see the impish smirk he offers in response to Nora’s annoyed huff.

Every day of presentations, they have to return a half-page response to demonstrate their attention during the most boring month of Alexander’s academic career to date. He sits down to type the last one with a not insignificant amount of relief, and knows immediately which tangential bit of information he’ll focus on.

Except.

Curiosity seizes him harder than expected when he searches the internet for _congressional pages_. His paper takes on a title even before he’s quite narrowed down what to write.

_Congressional Page Program: Not so tedious after all _

He learns that teenage John Hancock obtained his spot in a highly-competitive high school program most likely through connections from his wealthy, campaign-donor father. He learns that Hancock served as an intern in the same congressman’s office during one college summer, and later spent an entire semester interning for one of his state’s senators.

He learns that pages were appointed for either a five-month school term, or a month of the summer, and that they attended classes and stayed in dorms right on the Hill, amidst a whirlwind and hectic schedule that sounds like just the kind of challenge Alexander feels he would thrive at.

He learns that Mrs. Ingram is right, and that the seventy-student House program was discontinued some years prior.

Except.

The last line of the article he’s reading states:

_The Senate Page Program, which employs thirty students each term, continues to operate and has no plans to shutter its doors, according to Majority Leader Robert Yates (DR – NY)._

Alexander can’t look it up fast enough.

x---x

Mrs. Ingram expresses some passing interest when he informs her that one wing of the page program still exists on the Hill.

She stares at him blankly when he sticks around after class and informs her, “Applications are due between January and March of sophomore year, and I want to go for it.”

After a few terse seconds, she just says, “…I’m sorry?”

“The Senate Page Program. I read up on it over the weekend, it sounds awesome.”

“I… see.” Slowly she begins arranging the stack of response papers so she can clip them neatly together and slide them into the file tray labeled _9th-Honors_. “Aren’t you… forgetting something?”

He poured over the website for two straight days, he doesn’t think so. “No?”

Her mouth does _that thing_, that thing whenever he exudes a certain amount of cheek but not enough to be told off for it. “You don’t have a senator to apply with, Alexander, you can’t.”

“Eh,” he shrugs, one shoulder. “I have gumption.”

“Is _gumption_ listed in the eligibility requirements?”

Irritation ignites within him. “No, but _citizenship _is, and last I checked I meet that one just fine.”

“You certainly have a rosy view of a world that’s largely built on nepotism, and I don’t want to see you waste your time on an application that’s going to be discarded the second some poor intern sees that you’re not a constituent. Whose office would you even apply through?”

“I hadn’t worked that part out quite yet,” he answers stiffly. “But I have time.”

A dry smile turns up a corner of her mouth; it’s not a precisely _friendly _look. “And what do your parents have to say about your scheme to dash off to the mainland for half of your junior year?”

He presses his lips together and lets out a noisy sigh. “Okay,” he hoists his textbooks up into his arms. “Never mind.”

She tries to call him back but he ignores her and keeps walking. On balance, he figures he risks being in _more _trouble if he continues the conversation, versus whatever punishment she might dole out for walking away.

x---x

He doesn’t abandon the idea entirely, but Mrs. Ingram’s reaction does sour him on it for a couple of weeks. Eventually though, he does find himself pulling the website back up and reading about the program, the application process, the insanely demanding schedule the school-term pages are subjected to, and he _yearns _for this, yearns for it in a way he hasn’t yearned for anything since the awful finality of putting his mother’s dead body in the ground stopped his desperate and futile hope that somehow it’d all be a mistake, that she’d get better and come home and finish nursing him back to health.

Ms. Uppingham in English would humor him at least, he’s confident of that. But he doesn’t want someone who _humors _him, he wants someone who _believes _in him, and that’s a strange impulse after spending the past two years increasingly confident that he can ultimately rely on no one but himself.

He thinks about Reverend Knox’s admonitions back in the fall.

He thinks about Mister Pendleton. Because really, the obvious response to Mrs. Ingram’s unenthusiastic reply presented itself some months ago, after his revelatory conversation with Reverend Knox, after his realization of the usefulness of whatever latent _pride _he could summon.

Because, really, for whatever reason, Mister Pendleton’s already demonstrated an interest in his mind and its potential. The _problem_, however, is that his timeline is suddenly and drastically advanced, and he doesn’t much enjoy the thought of waiting to fully establish himself and his goals until he’s sitting in the man’s class come August.

And he doesn’t just need a recommendation – he needs _help_, he needs insight, someone to bounce ideas off when balancing the sheer audacity of the maneuver.

A number of ideas pass through his mind about how best to approach the teacher. It’s a busy time of year, winding down the last few weeks of school, preparing for final exams and term papers, desperate students begging for some last-ditch extra credit and never mind the general air of restlessness that pervades the halls as the days count down towards summer break.

In the end, there is no art to his approach. Mister Pendleton approaches _him_ first, in fact, at the start of the last regular week of school, ducks into Mrs. Ingram’s room just around the corner from his own a few minutes before the third period bell. He shoots a vague wave in Mrs. Ingram’s direction, pauses to scan the room, and then makes a beeline for Alexander’s desk.

“An update from the world of xenophobic, nativist academia,” he says with a wry grin, holding out a book.

Alexander takes it, momentarily confused. “What is…? _No_,” he catches sight of the author’s name, the same purported academic he’d so thoroughly disparaged back in the fall. “He didn’t.”

“He did.”

“Thanks, I hate it. Can I read it?”

“Yes, _but_,” he holds up a single finger in warning even as Alexander is greedily pulling the thing closer and flipping open the cover. “Finals first. Save it for summer. Bring it back in August.”

“Deal.” He even closes it again, pushes it to the upper right corner of his desk for good measure. “Thanks.”

Mister Pendleton taps his fingertips idly at the edge of Alexander’s desk, nods once with a smile, and turns on his heel to get back to his own classroom.

Alexander watches him go, even as he’s aware of the vaguely curious glances from a couple of his seat neighbors. Watches him go and realizes…

This is his moment.

He leaps up and darts down the row of desks and out the door before Mrs. Ingram can quite get his full name out of his mouth in disapproving rebuke. He ducks around the corner, and catches the man even as he’s reaching for the door handle of his classroom.

“Mister Pendleton?”

The door cracks open, but then he lets go of the knob and turns in surprise. “Alexander?”

“I need your help with something,” he gets out all in a rush.

A ridiculous request from a student he barely knows. Not even _his _student. A week before finals. Before summer break.

Ridiculous.

“Certainly,” the teacher steps closer, expression balancing more towards curiosity than concern but containing some of both. “What can I do for you?”

The bell rings to signal the start of the period. Alexander starts, and loses his focus. “I, ah…”

A few doors shut up and down the hall as teachers begin lessons. Probably including Mrs. Ingram’s.

He pulls a deep breath.

“I need to comb through the personal, professional, and political histories of one hundred United States senators and decide which one would be most likely to humor a poor orphan from an unrepresented territory vying for an impossibly competitive spot in a highly prestigious program usually reserved for the children of rich lobbyists and campaign donors.”

Whatever Mister Pendleton might have _expected _to come from his mouth, if he harbored any expectations at all, _that _was most certainly not it. But he doesn’t laugh; doesn’t reject him outright.

He considers him. Contemplative. _Intrigued_. And then a slow grin pulls up the corners of his mouth, and he just says, “Okay.”

“Okay?” Alexander repeats, sounding far more demanding than intended.

Mister Pendleton shrugs. “I’m a history teacher; we love a good rebellion every once in a while.”

x---x

For all that idle worries have been building in the back of his mind about what summer might bring, without the constant distraction of school – the year ends in unremarkable fashion with a final equation on his algebra exam solved, a final glance over his packet before depositing it on his teacher’s desk with a quiet exchange of well-wishes for the break.

He goes to the cafeteria to wait. Neddy’s finishing a history exam, and then has English afterwards, and Alexander turned down Mister Stevens’s offer to come pick him up early and return for Neddy. Good a time as any to get started on his new book in the relative quiet of the other souls waiting on rides, or cramming for exams during the last testing block.

Neddy turns up shortly after the bell signals the fifteen-minute break between exams. Alexander glances up and catches his searching gaze, standing near the line for the a la carte window. Neddy makes a quick questioning pantomime that is either asking if Alexander wants a drink or if he’s buried the body yet; Alexander assumes it’s the former, offers a wave of vague assent, and returns to his reading.

A cappuccino descends into his peripheral view, and then Neddy follows, sinking down onto the bench at his right with a groan, cup in his left hand while he flexes his right repeatedly. “English is going to kill me; how’d I manage the two writing-heavy tests back-to-back?” Alexander hums what he hopes is an empathetic sound while he finishes out his page. Neddy stares at him, unsubtly, atop a sip of his drink. “And you’re… already reading a new book. No appreciation for newfound freedom.”

“Mister Pendleton lent it to me,” Alexander murmurs. It’s quiet – or, rather Neddy’s quiet as the cafeteria fills gradually with other bedraggled students looking for a caffeine or sugar hit before sitting their last exams – while Alexander finishes his page, and then he marks his spot, sets down the book, reaches for his coffee, and finally notices Neddy’s pointed stare. “What?”

Neddy takes a long – _very long _– slow sip while he tries to master his smile. “Nothing.” Alexander narrows his eyes. “_Nothing_,” he insists, “I just… think your infatuation with my history teacher is really cute.”

Indignation rises in his chest almost as violently as the hot flush in his cheeks. “Neddy, what the _hell_?”

“What?” Alexander makes an incoherent noise of protest. “Oh, come on, not like _that_, I just mean…”

“_What_?”

Neddy stares at him like he’s grown an extra head, and it occurs that maybe he’s overreacting to this just a little. “Sorry,” he says after a horridly awkward pause. “Jesus. I just meant… I don’t know.” he shrugs, and reaches over to tap a finger against Alexander’s temple. “He’s smart, he thinks you’re smart, he’s paying attention to you, of course you’re…” to his credit, he doesn’t repeat the word that evoked such a vicious reaction in the first place.

But then he continues, and Alexander wishes he’d just said it and stopped. “I guess it just seems like you haven’t really had that, since your mom passed. Or, you know… from a _man _since your dad left.”

There’s no censure in his words, in his tone. But there’s resignation, verging on _sadness_, and Alexander hears what he doesn’t say.

_Because you won’t let _us_ in on that part of you_.

He won’t let them in, Neddy and his father, and is constantly, in varying degrees, working towards his eventual escape from their lives he’s so thoroughly intruded upon. Has enlisted the teacher in question in the endeavor before he’s even _told _the Stevens men about his longshot scheme to apply, and for a briefly horrified moment he doesn’t recognize himself, this cutthroat, ambitious person he’s become in pursuit of that out Mister Stevens so cautiously mentioned so many long months ago in completely different context.

_Pride_, though. He wants to move his life on _his _terms, and his terms alone, from here on out. Maybe Reverend Knox landed that hit closer than Alexander could bring himself to realize until now.

Neddy must see the existential crisis brewing behind his eyes, because he looks suddenly alarmed, and guilty, and he nervously checks his watch to see how much time he has for damage control before his last exam. “Fuck, Alex, that was – I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have…”

Heat pricks the corners of his eyes. Alexander tries to remember what Neddy had said months ago, offered him. _I wouldn’t tell dad if you wanted to talk, or rage, or vent. Or cry_. And the thing is that he shocks himself to realize he _does _kind of want to, _now_, at the worst possible moment and over the dumbest provocation.

He swallows. Hard. “It’s fine,” he says. Reaches for his book and opens it back to his marked page, slow and measured. Like he’s afraid of startling himself with any sudden movements. Afraid of popping that growing bubble of emotion tickling quite inconveniently at the back of his throat. “Maybe you’re right.”

A quick glance over the top of his book reveals an expression that very clearly says _It’s not fine and I know it’s not fine and you know I know it’s not fine, but I have an exam in five minutes so my hands are tied and you win. _

Neddy startles him with a hand curled around the back of his neck. He pulls his head in close and presses their foreheads together for a moment, just a moment. “I gotta go.”

“Yeah,” Alexander acknowledges blankly, taken aback by the intimacy of that quick exchange. “Write good.”

That earns a quick hair-ruffle that makes him scowl in indignation as Neddy grabs his drink and heads towards the English wing.

Alexander watches him go, and then slowly presses his book closed once again. The cafeteria is almost empty now – most anyone who’s already done is gone, just the handful of them waiting on rides, or waiting on siblings or friends to sit the last exam block before going home, going out to celebrate their summer freedom.

It’s almost empty, but it’s suddenly stifling. The low murmur of voices harsh in his ears, like his brain wants to latch on to each whisper of a conversation and can’t figure out in which direction to focus. Fidgety energy that’s more mental than physical seizes him, and he collects his things and heads towards the front of the school so he can have his existential crisis alone outside.

There’s a low wall in front of the school lining the sidewalk that runs adjacent to the parking lot. He trudges down the steps from the front door and hops up onto the wall, turning sideways so he can pull his feet up and lie down on the warm concrete, strangely soothing beneath his stiff neck and back after a long morning of writing hunched over desks.

He lies there for a while, feeling something like a lizard basking on a rock. Ignoring the occasional car passing through to pick up a student, or someone just finished with their last exam and getting the hell out of dodge for the summer, or possibly forever. Voices pass him by as people trickle out of the school, and some of them quiet as they near his prone form at the bottom of the stairs, but none stop to bother him.

Until.

“That book put you to sleep already?” He cracks a single eye open and squints at Mister Pendleton standing a few feet away on the sidewalk, watching him bemusedly with his bag slung over his shoulder and a set of keys in hand.

“I’m having an existential crisis,” he explains, closing his eye again and returning his face skyward, “This seemed the best place.”

It’s silent for a few seconds, but Alexander hears no sound of departing footsteps. He folds his hands atop his stomach and waits the teacher out.

“Exam troubles?”

“Dead mother troubles,” he returns easily, lazily, like he’s commenting on the weather.

Of course, that didn’t work on Mister Pendleton the first time, so he doesn’t know why he should dream it would _now_. Not that the man knows what to _say_ to that, but it doesn’t have the desired effect of awkwarding him out of the conversation entirely.

There’s a rustle of movement, the sound of the bag hitting the ground, and he cracks another eye open just in time to see the teacher hoist himself up on to the wall next to Alexander’s feet. He sits there for a minute, peering absently out over the parking lot, before glancing around and catching Alexander watching. “You waiting on a ride?”

He shrugs. “Neddy’s finishing an English test.”

“You want to come help me collect some things from the fieldhouse?”

_No_, Alexander thinks. “Sure,” Alexander says, before levering himself sideways and sitting up with some difficulty, back even stiffer than before. He gathers up his notebook with the pen clipped to the top ring, the book Mister Pendleton lent him, and hops down to trail obediently after the man.

“I’ve been thinking,” Mister Pendleton says as they crunch down the gravel path that leads around to the fieldhouse and the track, and Alexander has to hurry to catch up so he can better hear him, “about your senator dilemma.”

He tosses the remnants of his cold coffee in a trashcan set alongside the path. “Oh?”

They reach the fieldhouse and Mister Pendleton fishes out the right key to open the door. “I’m going to take a very long weekend to brace myself,” he murmurs, finally jerking the rusted lock into place and pulling the door open. “And then grade exams.” He leads the way down a short and musty hallway to a single multi-use office, littered with a random assortment of various team-related paraphernalia, awards, file boxes. “But probably week after next, I’ll drop Tom a line and see about maybe meeting at the library to do some research?”

Alexander continues to peer around the space and doesn’t answer. That infuriating heat is starting to prick behind his eyes again and this was a bad idea, he should have done the rude thing and said _no_, but after his outrageous favor to which Mister Pendleton readily agreed, that hardly seemed –

“Hey.”

He finishes his circuit and blinks at the desk, where Mister Pendleton is paused, a couple of binders in his hand midway towards putting them in one of the file boxes labeled _CC – Pendleton_. And then he wipes at his face and sniffs once, tellingly, despite his best efforts to modulate his voice. “Sorry, what?”

“Can you grab that bin on the bottom – ? To the – Yeah,” he affirms when Alexander spies the right one. “Thanks.”

He puts the bin on the ground and then balances the box on top of it. Laptop case still slung over his shoulder, he maneuvers to pick up the whole lot, before Alexander leans over and slowly removes the box from the pile and shrugs as if to say _You said help, right? _

Mister Pendleton just smiles at him and nods at the open door for Alexander to lead the way. He does, and then pauses while the teacher repeats the whole saga trying to re-lock the door, and then they’ve got their respective hauls and are heading back towards the parking lot. “Hey, Jordan,” Mister Pendleton replies as a couple of passing students wave at him on their way to their cars. “Have a good summer, Carrie.”

The end of the parking lot has a few rows marked off for teachers and staff. They head towards a nondescript car that’s so blue it looks black from a distance, and Mister Pendleton pops a button on his keyring to open the trunk as they approach. He takes a minute to rearrange a few things already in there, makes space for the bin in his hands, and then turns to Alexander to grab the box.

He’s sliding his laptop case into the small gap remaining when the surge of insecurities becomes too much and Alexander finds himself blurting out, “Neddy’s my best friend, and the kind of brother I wish I’d actually _had_.” Mister Pendleton turns to face him, expression neutral, waiting. “And his dad’s been nothing but kind and generous as long as I’ve known him, and yet my every waking thought some days is absolutely _consumed_ with how I’m going to get away from here. I haven’t even told either of them that I want nothing more than to do a damn _trial run _of the actual, final, permanent escape I’m planning, come college, and I don’t know _how _to tell them, and now I just feel… _guilty_ and secretive, and ungrateful.”

Movements slow – eyes drawn down, nodding slowly, considering – Mister Pendleton turns to shut the trunk, and then leans against the car and crosses his arms over his chest.

When he starts talking, his words are slow, halting. “I don’t… know a lot about you, Alexander.” For a brief moment, Alexander thinks he’s actually, _now_, finally succeeded in pushing the man’s interest away right at the moment when he’s cracked and craving _any _kind of insight or guidance or validation. “I know you’re very intelligent. I know you’re driven. I know that life… has not been especially kind to you lately.”

He shrugs and averts his gaze to hide the tears pooling in the corners of his eyes.

“And I _think_… that right now you’re finding yourself in an unwinnable situation. Pressured to be happier in an environment that you can’t separate from better times.” He reluctantly pulls his gaze back up to the teacher’s face and chews on his lip. “Saint Croix has a long memory. Too small, too slow, too static. I don’t think it’s an accident that you picked a school in Manhattan, where you could spend ten lifetimes and still uncover new surprises, new faces every day.”

“Yeah,” he acknowledges, barely audible.

“For what it’s worth,” Mister Pendleton tacks on after a cautious pause. “I suspect that pressure is mostly… _in_ternal. Self-inflicted.” Alexander blinks once, twice. Hadn’t quite considered it from that perspective before. “And that when you do voice your desire to go – if you still want that – you might find that the notion of you leaving might provoke sadness, yes… but won’t be viewed as an _affront_.”

“But –”

“You can’t make everyone happy,” Mister Pendleton cuts him off gently. “You know how I know that?” He shakes his head. “Because _you _are already unhappy. Leaving isn’t guaranteed to _fix _that – but this desperation you have for an environment that isn’t a constant, _painful _reminder isn’t a selfish one, Alexander, it’s its own form of self-preservation instinct.”

That framing pokes at that wounded _pride _somewhere deep inside; as if he ought to be _better _than his baser instincts, and that _this _one amounts to little more than simply running away.

“I’ll tell you what,” Mister Pendleton says after a long moment’s pause. “Let’s table the application project until August.” He holds up a hand to forestall the objection on the tip of Alexander’s tongue. “We’ll have plenty of time. But I don’t need to have had you in class to know that you worked yourself impossibly hard all year. Take a break. Sort out how you’re feeling, have the conversations you need to have.”

He says the latter while searching Alexander’s face, like he’s trying to peer through his eyes into his brain, and he thinks about Reverend Knox again.

_It’s not that you don’t want help, it’s that you don’t want to admit you need it._

Maybe it’s a vague undercurrent of paranoia, but he kind of suspects that the _conversations _the teacher suggests doesn’t just mean Mister Stevens and Neddy.

But then… maybe he’s on to something after all.

He has an abrupt and desperate need to talk to his mother.

x---x

Saturday night, Alexander asks Mister Stevens if he’ll take him to the church in the morning.

He says he wants to go alone.

Sunday morning, he waves a farewell from the entrance, stepping aside to hold open the door for an older couple coming through – and then he just stays there, watching the car drive back off, before slipping back down from the entryway and heading across the road to the cemetery. He doesn’t waste time wandering today, heads straight back to the plot he’s not visited since Christmas.

Service lasts about forty-five minutes, and he wants every minute of it he can get. To talk, to cry, to plead and confess and repent.

Let the dead keep his secrets alongside their own.

x---x

He doesn’t so much lose track of time as cease to care entirely. There’s a detached sort of understanding that, yes, Mister Stevens is going to return for him, and it’s going to cause some measure of concern or worse when he finds out that Alexander never actually made it to the service. But once he exhausts the things he came to say, and more than a few things he swore to never again speak of aloud, a bone-deep weariness sets in, so strong he _aches _at the thought of forcing himself back to standing and making his way back to the church.

So he doesn’t. And he doesn’t unwrap himself from his folded posture, arms hugging his legs to his chest and chin propped on his knees, when he feels his phone vibrate in his back pocket once, twice, and then several times as it rings and rings out.

Credit where it’s due though – it’s only a matter of minutes before he catches sight of a figure winding its way to him. Really, where else would he be? And the reverend lowers himself slowly on audibly-creaking joints to sit on the dewy grass by his side. “How is she?” he asks.

“Quiet,” Alexander admits. “But she was always a good listener.”

Reverend Knox hums agreeably to that, shifting a bit on the hard ground to angle more towards him. “Can I hug you?”

_No_, Alexander thinks. “No,” he mumbles, so softly he doubts the man picked up on it. But there’s no move to wrap an arm around his shoulder, no movement at all, and maybe the reverend’s not such a bad listener either.

Maybe Alexander’s just a bad talker.

“You remember when I said I don’t want to be here anymore?” He gets a hummed acknowledgement. “D’you think there’s any meaningful difference between _leaving _and _running away_?”

“From what?”

_Demons_, Alexander thinks. “Memories,” Alexander answers.

“Tricky thing about memories,” Reverend Knox tells him softly, “is that they come right along on the journey with you.”

He tucks his face into his knees and heaves great, deep breaths, trying to suppress the sob threatening to rip from his chest.

“There’s something I maybe should have told you, when we had that conversation,” the reverend says after a long minute, watching and waiting to see if the eruption would finally happen. “You were about eight, the first time Rachel confided in me her growing realization that this island was too small for you.”

Alexander blinks up at him, vision blurred through tears.

“This island feels claustrophobic for most of us, from time to time, but she always felt you had a certain wanderlust that was as much intellectual as physical. Maybe more so. By the time she died, I think she accepted that you were meant for greater pursuits than this place had to offer. And I think that’s still true, it’s just…” He pauses, visibly casts about for the right words. “Your motivations, your… _curiosity_… it’s all tainted by grief.”

Alexander sniffs loudly and wipes at his face with his sleeve.

“The drive for knowledge, for _discovery_, should have had you peeking through doors, finding your way to bigger worlds some years down the line with Rachel’s help. And instead, you’re concocting college plans before your first year of high school is out, because drive has become desperation and discovery, escape. Yes,” he offers a crooked smile, “Tom told me about your Columbia schemes when we were sorting out your birthday gift.”

He considers confessing to the reverend then and there about his more immediate scheme; but Mister Pendleton’s words echo through his head and hold his mouth at bay. Maybe it’s best to take more time to sort out his own head and motivations before drawing anyone else into the tornado of his orbit.

But maybe he’s a masochist at heart, because instead he detours into equally fraught waters. “I don’t know if church is for me so much anymore.”

If he’s expecting any great despair from the reverend, he’s sorely disappointed by the gently bemused look that settles across the man’s face. “I was rather starting to suspect that, yes. I notice you never quite found your way back to the communion line. I suppose I flattered myself to imagine you found _some _measure of peace in attending the service from time to time as you do, nonetheless.”

“I do,” he surprises himself with the ready admission, and the realization that he actually means it. “I think a lot about mom.” And because he can’t help but poke at the response, or lack thereof: “Aren’t you… I don’t know, worried about my soul or something?”

“Are _you _worried about your soul?”

He averts his eyes, looks instead at his mother’s headstone. The tragically close dates etched beneath her name, the epitaph that rings hollow now, that makes him want to scoff at the audacity of attempting to summarize the weight of a person’s life in a few simple words engraved on a glorified rock.

A few minutes pass in silence while he mulls the question.

While he mulls those pivotal moments in the course of the past few years’ upheavals.

The emotionless, stony-faced way his mother broke the news, that their father wasn’t coming home. Ever. The fact that he can’t quite recall his final interaction with his dad, or even much of that last day before he left.

The way that abandonment rendered James cold and cruel, and the way his mother bore the brunt of it by sending him off more and more to Neddy’s.

The way Mister Stevens took a phone call and then shooed Neddy out of his own bedroom so he could sit on the edge of the bed where Alexander lay recovering from the flu – and the way Alexander could read the awful truth in his stilted movements, in the shock settling behind his eyes, yet still couldn’t bring himself to believe the _words _that came out of the man’s mouth.

The way Peter took him to the bookstore every Friday, without fail, and let him stay as long as he liked, with desperate, helpless, silent apology seared behind his eyes.

The way James took charge for the first time in months, upon returning home and finding Alexander sitting hunched in the furthest corner of the apartment from Peter’s bedroom; the way he called 911 to report what happened and then, cool as you please, walked to the kitchen and vomited bile into the sick.

And the way James wouldn’t look at him when a police officer gently herded him out, as Alexander stared at him beseechingly for what, now, almost two years on, he’s forced to admit was likely the very last time.

The only honest answer he can give that question, he decides, is _I don’t know_. And he’s surprised to find that he… accepts it. Is surprised to find a practical limit to his need for information, for simple _understanding _in a cruelly complicated world.

“I’ll take that hug now,” he says softly in lieu of response.

Mister Stevens and Neddy are sitting on the steps leading up to the church door by the time they make their way back out of the cemetery. The congregation has long dispersed and they look small there, talking in low voices that don’t cut through the mild breeze until Mister Stevens glances up and catches sight of their approaching forms.

Neddy follows his gaze and makes a move to stand before his father motions him back down, and Alexander… remembers something else.

The way Mister Stevens had again banished Neddy from a delicate conversation; this time, one innocuous weekend afternoon last spring when they’d collected him from the group home and gone out for lunch and spent the day on a quiet beach. And Mister Stevens shooed Neddy on ahead to the car and told Alexander about the last few months of jumping through hoops to qualify as a foster guardian. That if he wanted, they could talk to his case worker and start the ball rolling on moving him for what should be the final time during his tenure with Family Services.

_Why shouldn’t he want? _Alexander had wondered.

_How had it gone so wrong?_ he wonders now.

He wants to start over, he realizes.

_This is love_, he reminds himself, watching the patient worry brew steadily behind his guardian’s eyes. Maybe not a love he understands; maybe not one he entirely _wants_. Certainly not one he knows what to do with, and…

And maybe that’s okay.

He can’t rewind time; can’t go back to that early August afternoon when he’d finally moved in, when he set foot into a familiar house and trailed an excited Neddy to an unfamiliar bedroom and watched, off-kilter, while he deposited his old suitcase on a new bed and turned with an infectious grin to show off the remodeled space and found only an unsettled stare, until Mister Stevens urged his son to give Alexander some space to adjust.

He can’t rewind time – but maybe he can start over anyway.

Maybe it hadn’t gone so wrong, really.

And for the first time in more than two years, a faint spark kindles in his chest, and it occurs that maybe – just maybe – somehow – someday – everything will be okay in the end.

He wants to start over – and maybe _love _is the realization that, without question, they’re going to let him. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, friends. Hope you enjoyed this random bit of backstory in the neverending AU.   
XD


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